Dr. Jaegerlove; or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love 'Pacific Rim'

A common topic of conversation this summer has centered around how big blockbusters depict sequences of mass destruction. While Man of Steel and Star Trek: Into Darkness seemed comfortable sacrificing the heroism of their main characters in order to hit Hollywood’s collapsed building quota, Pacific Rim refreshingly portrays the Jaegers and their pilots as protectors first and foremost.  They’re not always able to prevent the monstrous Kaiju from reaching populated cities like Sydney and Hong Kong, but their first orders are always to engage the creatures miles off the coast if they can.

If you haven’t seen the movie yet, yes indeed, that is a giant robot using a Chinese oil tanker to bludgeon a kaiju. All of Hong Kong’s citizens had fled to fallout shelters, so I’m guessing the ship was empty when they picked it up…? In any case, when I saw this 1000-foot robot dragging an oil tanker toward a million-ton monster, I felt a visceral pleasure that I can only equate to watching my favorite underdog football team make a Super Bowl run.

Fresh off watching Into Darkness, I can’t help wondering why I didn’t feel the same way when Spock beat the snot out of Khan. I love Spock and I was trying my hardest to invest all of the character’s history and motivations into his dogged pursuit of Khan, but it just fell flat. I think it’s got to have something to do with a sense of heroic purpose.

In Pacific Rim, the jaegers were built to do one very specific thing – hit kaiju really hard. Symbolically, though, they’re more than just battering rams, and in this respect Del Toro seems to be more agile with his symbols than Snyder and Abrams were. The jaegers represent the collective effort and desperation of the human race. As such, when they hit kaiju with metal fists, shipping containers, and chain swords, they’re striking with the hopes, fears, and future of mankind behind them. It makes very little logical sense that the jaegers look like us; with the resources put into one robot, we could probably have built three or four massive guns that would have done the job just as well. But it’s important that they look like us. They are us abstracted to a techno-sublime level. The jaegers might be inefficient, illogical representations of machismo, but isn’t that what inefficient, illogical humanity would produce in a situation like this?

So should I be worried by my response to Pacific Rim? Its unabashed macho-positivism makes me shake my head, but I think it also provides me with some insight on a couple other personal interests. Beowulf, for instance, had to have been composed to do the same kind of thing to its Anglo-Saxon audience. Similarly, an NFL football team can be viewed as a sort of jaeger built for one very specific competitive purpose. Pacific Rim taps into that vein and pumps it full of sour-skittle paste. And I can’t wait for my next hit.